Clumsy with chopsticks but can't live without them... ** I don't post English translations of Japanese recipes without permissions from the recipe authors. But feel free to contact me about the dishes you're interested in.

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"OBACHAN" means a "middle-aged woman" or "aunty" in Japanese.
.*************************. Having moved back to my hometown in April 2009, I live in one of the desperately underpopulated areas in Japan now. Let me share my life in a real countryside with aging parents living in the same house. And here in Muroto -- the place where I chose to live -- you can hear the heartbeat of the Earth! ;)

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Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Maybe it wasn’t a smart thing to do, but I had a double cheeseburger before work tonight. When I got out of work, I felt hungry again, but didn’t want to eat anything greasy. So my choice for the very late supper was something quick & hot, and easy on my stomach. It’s called nabeyaki-udon.

Nabeyaki means “heated in a pot (I guess).” Generally udon is served in a bowl, but when in Nabeyaki style, usually one serving of udon is heated in a small clay pot and served as it is in the pot. This way you can eat udon noodles hot, still boiling in the pot when served. It’s something really nice to have on a cold winter night.

What I got today is --- busy mom’s helper and lazy obachan’s best friend --- an instant Nabeyaki-udon package. Instead of a clay pot, you can use this aluminum container to heat the udon. Everything you need is packed inside: udon noodles, a slice of kamaboko (steamed fish paste), negi, agetama (deep-fried crispy batter flakes) and aburage (deep-fried tofu ). There’s a plastic bag full of soup underneath the noodles. All you have to do is just take everything out of the plastic bag, put in the aluminum container, and heat on the stovetop. E a s y :)The aburage is seasoned sweet, and it tastes very good with the soy-sauce based udon soup. Usually I add more vegetables, but tonight I got really lazy.

A bowl of udon with aburage is called kitsune(fox) udon, maybe because the light brown aburage resembles a fox. If an egg is added, it is called tsukimi (moon-viewing) udon, obviously because the eggyolk looks like a full-moon. So in my nabeyaki-udon tonight, a fox was enjoying the view of the full-moon. Pretty poetic, isn’t it?

Thank you so much, I bought two of these for dinner tonight because they looked yummy, but in my tiredness I didn't notice that there were no directions at all on the container, much less anything in english! I've been looking online for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to cook this darned thing and I'm STARVING! You're a life saver.